DEVOPSdigest

Once upon a time, organizations could choose whether or not they would allow remote working for their employees. They could sit in boardrooms and IT war rooms and hand out remote work passes like golden tickets for the Chocolate Factory. Covid-19 has changed everything. The war rooms and boardrooms are collecting dust, as decision-makers and employees work from home (WFH).

The remote work trajectory has moved from “a long time coming” to “that time is now.” But what does this actually mean for the organization in terms of its architecture and technical specifications — especially when not all organizations share the same levels of remote working maturity?

Resistance is Futile

Until recently, many organizations have stubbornly resisted WFH. Security and access to data are a concern as remote working introduces gaps that the business may not have considered. The organization has legitimate concerns about how big these gaps are and how significant the vulnerabilities.

The other aspect is, of course, cultural — will employees just sit in front of the TV or play with their kids instead of getting the job done?

Covid-19 has created a beta run of the new normal, and a lot of companies are pleasantly surprised because their people are just as productive now as they were in the office. If not more so. People are more digitally available than ever before.

The other consideration is level of maturity. Everyone is suddenly online and WFH, but the continuum of preparedness varies significantly. Some companies with bricks and mortar security systems and limited WFH platforms are far behind the curve compared to the early adopters with battalions of people already WFH before the pandemic. Then some sit somewhere in between, trying to figure out what their next steps should be. Suddenly they are trying to find solutions that allow them to tackle security and WFH technology decisions intelligently.

They have questions. How can they deliver the same experience at home as in the office? What technology do they need? Should the cloud be hybrid, public, or private? Which stack, which vendor, which platform?

Those that have adopted cloud services because it makes access to their infrastructure, be it servers or data file servers, more ubiquitous and extensible, will be able to plug-in solutions that allow for faster and easier remote working. Those that have resisted the move will now be facing questions around how to move servers and applications to the compute cloud and how to get the data integrated into their cloud architecture.

Go to: Rebuilding the Post-Pandemic Architecture for Remote Workers - Part 2